Aftermath of Evolution

Ideological Abuses of Evolution

It is safe to say no theory in the history of science has been so thoroughly abused in
the name of ideology as evolution. It was the first far-reaching theory in biology, it
seemed to have implications for human society, and ideologues of all shades saw evolution
as a powerful ally or an equally deadly threat. Some of the major ideological abuses of
evolution are shown below.

Ideological Interpretation of Evolution

Supporting Responses

Opposition Responses

Evolution disproves the existence of God

Atheism

Fundamentalism

Evolution negates purpose

Nihilism

Fundamentalism
Marxist opposition

Evolution implies that society should operate according to "survival of the
fittest"

Social Darwinism
Eugenics

Fundamentalism
Marxist opposition
Lysenkoism

Evolution implies some races are superior to others

Racist movements

Fundamentalism
Marxist opposition

Evolution and Assaults on Religious Belief

Understanding the Issues

Having researched this subject in quite considerable depth, I cringe whenever I hear a
fellow scientist ask "Why can't evolution simply be God's way of creating life? I
know then that I'm dealing with somebody who wants to join a debate without acquiring even
the most minimal literacy first.

The historical background page spells out a few of the
problems such an interpretation (termed theistic evolution in conservative
religious circles) raises. How could a loving God ordain a universe in which most
organisms are fated to be killed and eaten? Yet these objections alone are not
insuperable. The objections to God ordaining predation are largely based on sentimentality
and anthropomorphism; predation might not be within the domain of morality at all. Also,
believers have coexisted for centuries with the far more troubling issue of how a loving
God could create hell.

The issue of agreement with the Bible is more serious but again by itself isn't
insuperable. Many believers had been accommodating themselves to the geologic time scale
for a long time by interpreting "day" in Genesis to mean an indefinitely long
time. The need to reinterpret much of Genesis as allegorical or mythological was a hurdle
that many believers could not cross, however. Nevertheless, the core of the problem lies
elsewhere.

Many scientists don't like to use the term "believe" when talking about
scientific theories because they want to differentiate scientific opinion from other
subjective systems of belief. And therein lies the fundamental fallacy academics commit in
dealing with conservative religious believers. No major world religion claims to
hold subjective beliefs. To a Hindu, it is not a matter of personal perception
whether or not you are reincarnated. To a Muslim, it is not a matter of opinion whether or
not Mohammed heard the word of God. To a fundamentalist Christian, whether or not you
believe in heaven or hell is absolutely irrelevant to whether or not you will go there. All
the major world religions claim to deal in matters of objective fact. The facts
may not be demonstrable by experiment or immediate observation, but their eventual
objective reality is considered to be beyond dispute. To militant religious believers,
their doctrines are fully documented on a par with the Apollo moon landings or the
structure of DNA. If you don't accept the documentation, that's your problem, not theirs.

The failure to realize that religions hold their doctrines to be facts
leads to immense frustrations on both sides of the science-religion debate. Both sides
talk past one another. Muslims, for example, find it absolutely incomprehensible that any
Westerner who becomes well-informed about Islam does not immediately convert. They regard
the truth of Islam to be so self-evident that any other response is unthinkable.

Fundamentalism

In Day the Universe Changed (p. 272), James Burke reproduces a cartoon
called The Descent of the Modernists. It shows a staircase going down, with
steps labeled:

Christianity
Bible not Infallible
Man not Made in God's Image
No Miracles
No Virgin Birth
No Deity
No Atonement
No Resurrection
Agnosticism
Atheism

A young student is stepping off the second step. Halfway down is a modernist clergyman.
Stepping off the bottom step is a bearded college professor holding a chemist's flask.
He's become a scientist. The degeneration is complete. (Atheists, of course, imagine the
steps going up, not down.)

Confronted by the challenges of militant atheism, evolution, archeology and textual
analysis, conservative American Christians met shortly after 1900 to hammer out what they
regarded as the irreducible core of Christianity. They referred to these tenets as the
Five Fundamentals. Interestingly, the staircase above contains every one of them (one step
implies two of them):

Literal Infallibility of the Bible

Despite anecdotes to the contrary, fundamentalists are literate enough to know the Bible
was written in other languages. They assert that the Bible, in its original wording, is
infallible, and many insist on verbal inerrancy; that is, the actual words were
directly inspired by God. Thus, they insist on a literal Adam and Eve and Garden of Eden.
Anything else, they believe, leads to a slippery slope where no doctrine can really be
considered safe. Until you have actually dealt with fundamentalists, you cannot imagine
how closely they examine the wording of the Bible. And in their view, any evidence that
contradicts the Bible, no matter how sound it is otherwise, is wrong, and the fact
that it contradicts the Bible is proof that it's wrong.

The Virgin Birth and Deity of Christ

This point surprises many people, who consider Virgin Birth a "Catholic Thing"
connected with sexual repression. In fact, this is Christ's credentials; Old Testament
prophecies predict the Messiah will be born of a virgin. If the Virgin Birth didn't
happen, Christ is not the Messiah. By the way, if you think Virgin Birth and Immaculate
Conception are the same thing, you're illiterate. Go get informed before you try to
debate religion with anybody.

Christ's Atonement for Sin at the Crucifixion

To fundamentalists, the essence of Christianity is not Christ's personal example or
moral teachings, which aren't that much different from Buddha's, but his overcoming the
effects of the Fall by atoning for humanity's sins.

The Literal Resurrection of Christ

In traditional Christian theology, death was a consequence of the Fall. Christ's
resurrection is evidence that the effects of the Fall have been negated, and of course is
additional proof of his deity.

The Literal Second Coming of Christ at the End of the World

The Resurrection tread on the staircase incorporates this as well as the previous
doctrine. There will be a final reckoning and ultimate triumph over evil.

A reporter, groping for a term to describe the growing conservative movement, coined
the term "fundamentalist" and before long, fundamentalists themselves were using
it. The term has come to denote any believer who insists on strict adherence to a central
core of beliefs, so that we now speak of "Muslim fundamentalists."

Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier, "Why can't evolution simply be
God's way of creating life? is that from the fundamentalist viewpoint any compromise with
evolution fatally weakens the fabric of Christianity.

Militant Atheism

The idea that Christianity was a unified collection of doctrines based on a chain of
Scriptural interpretations was around long before fundamentalists (they codified the
doctrine, not invented it). Break the chain, in the view of many believers, and you break
Christianity, and both sides responded accordingly. Anti-religious debaters had a powerful
new weapon to use in undermining the historical and doctrinal basis of Christianity.

To devout believers of the 19th century, it must have seemed as if atheists were
popping out of the woodwork everywhere. One might well have asked "where are all
these atheists coming from? The answer is that they were there all along, but as long as
there was no prospect of winning a debate with believers, and as long as all the social
pressures worked against nonbelievers, they kept quiet. Moral: suppression is always
more dangerous in the long run for suppressors than their victims. Suppression creates
an illusion of conformity while driving the opposition into hiding where they are hard to
see. In the end, what appears to be a solid front actually turns out to be a hollow shell.
To anyone who still has doubts, I have just two words: Soviet Union.

Darwin has been accused of making it impossible to believe in God. What he actually did
was make it possible not to believe in God. The nature and origin of life was the
last large area of science that looked like it might have an inescapably supernatural
component, and Darwin kicked the props out from under that idea. You could still believe
that God guided evolution or not, but your belief had nothing at all to do with the
science. Another thing that happened as a consequence of evolution was a shift in the
burden of proof. Before Darwin, nonbelievers were in the position of having to disprove
the existence of God to a hostile audience; after Darwin, believers often had to prove the
existence of God to a skeptical audience.

The Scopes Trial

Many Southern states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution. John Scopes, a
high-school biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, argued with many of his friends that the
Tennessee law was unconstitutional; it violated the First Amendment. So they decided to
put the matter to a test. In 1925, Scopes lectured on evolution and was charged with
violating the law. So Scopes was no Galileo (for that matter, neither was Galileo!); this
was a test case and Scopes walked in with his eyes open. What nobody anticipated was that
the case would attract nationwide attention.

Clarence Darrow, the noted attorney, offered to conduct the defense. The prosecution
was handled by aging political legend William Jennings Bryan. During the trial, the small
town of Dayton became a media circus. The noted newspaper columnist H.L. Mencken, who
despised fundamentalists, wrote such scathing columns that there was talk of running him
out of town. At one point a local merchant put a caged gorilla in his store window so
people could decide the matter for themselves. "The poor beast cowered in his
cage" wrote Mencken, "afraid that it might be true." The climax of the
trial came when Darrow called Bryan to the stand as a recognized expert on Biblical
doctrine and grilled him mercilessly. Bryan may have been bypassed by time, but in his day
he had been a highly respected figure and even people who were solidly behind Scopes felt
that Darrow had crossed the line. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. The case was
appealed and thrown out on a technicality, so nobody got the Constitutional ruling they
had hoped for. Worn out by age and the stress of the trial, Bryan died a few days
afterward. Scopes became an oil geologist, spent most of his career in South America, and
died in 1966. Ironically, that was just about the time the Supreme Court finally did
consider the Constitutionality of the Tennessee law and threw it out.

It's impossible to see the Scopes Trial without images from the play and film Inherit
the Wind intruding. Inherit the Wind is compelling drama but very poor
history. In modern terms, it is a docudrama, and only loosely based on historical reality
at that. The Bryan character in the play is a bitter, judgmental, closed-minded man.
William Jennings Bryan had actually been a progressive politician in his prime, most
famous for a speech in which he attacked moneyed interests with the line "shall we
crucify mankind on a cross of gold?". He ran for President on the Democratic ticket
in 1896, 1900 and 1908, pulling in respectable popular and electoral vote totals. If he
was something of a fossil himself by the time of the Scopes Trial, he was nevertheless
widely respected as a man of principle and a great figure in his prime.

Scientific Creationism

Fundamentalist opponents of evolution launched a different strategy beginning about
1970. They argued that the Biblical account of creation was defensible as a scientific
theory, called scientific creationism. Their principal strategies included:

Arguing that since evolution was "only a theory", it should not be taught as a
fact and alternative views were equally valid (though not creation stories from other
religions).

Attacks on the credibility of geologic dating methods. In many cases they telescoped the
geologic time scale to fit into the framework of Noah's Deluge.

Attacks on the fossil evidence for evolution, especially denying the intermediate forms
in the fossil record.

Distinguishing between "microevolution" and "macroevolution";
arguing that observed changes in species do not prove that new species can evolve.

The fallacies in most of the creationist arguments are immediately obvious to
scientists but are superficially convincing to non-scientists, and especially people
looking for a way to reconcile science and religion. Although creationists specifically
avoided mentioning the Bible in their scientific writings, they usually rejected
well-established scientific views and substituted ideas that served no other purpose than
to validate the literal interpretation of Genesis. For example, they proposed exotic
theories of nuclear decay in which atoms decayed faster in the distant past. There is no
experimental or observational basis for these theories; their only function is to make it
possible to believe in a young Earth.

Scientific creationism is, in fact, pseudoscience, something deliberately and falsely
claiming to be scientific. A number of states passed laws requiring that creationism be
taught in school as an alternative to evolution. A Federal court considered the Arkansas
law in 1982, mercilessly exposed it as a pretext for teaching religious views, and
declared it unconstitutional. Ironically, the court denied the argument put forth
by Scopes, stating that it was not prepared to grant total academic freedom without any
outside oversight.

If creationism has been defeated in the courts and failed to win credibility among
scientists, it continues to be active at the grass-roots level. Opponents of evolution
have focused their efforts at influencing school curricula at the local level. Such
efforts can have national impact because fear of losing sales causes textbook publishers
to water down the evolution content of their texts, reinforcing the misconception that
evolution is little more than an opinion held by some scientists. Another tactic widely
used by anti-evolutionists in recent years is running "stealth" candidates for
school board seats, candidates who conceal or downplay their views on evolution until
after the election.

Social Darwinism

Lysenkoism

One of the most bizarre reactions to evolution took place in the Soviet Union. Trofim
Lysenko, a biologist, rejected Darwin on Marxist grounds. He reacted against Darwin
because of the lack of direction in Darwinian evolution and because of the capitalist
abuses of Social Darwinism. Instead he argued for the evolution of Lamarck. Lysenko
likened the appearance of a new environment to a political revolution, and the struggle of
organisms to adapt and pass on their improvements he compared to the workers struggling to
create a better society and pass it along to succeeding generations.

What made Lysenko so powerful was that he wedded his ideas so tightly to Marxist
ideology, and particularly that he became a personal friend of Stalin. During Lysenko's
heyday from the mid 1930's until the late 1940's, Soviet biologists either toed the Party
line, got out of genetics, or disappeared into the Gulag. Lysenko crippled Soviet biology
for a generation.

Eugenics and the Nazis

Another application of "survival of the fittest" was the interpretation that
society should help evolution along by encouraging the fit to reproduce and by barring the
unfit, a movement termed eugenics ("good genes"). Some aspects of this
notion are relatively noncontroversial; for example genetic screening can identify
marriage partners who carry genes for hereditary disorders.

In cruder form, this notion found expression in mandatory sterilization of the mentally
ill or handicapped and laws banning mixed-race marriages (how far we've come in a short
time is revealed by the fact that ten per cent of marriages in the U.S. are now
interracial). A more far-reaching interpretation held that society should encourage births
among the "fit" and discourage them among the "unfit." These views
were supported by numerous studies that seemed to show that traits like criminality could
be inherited. A number of the most influential studies were later revealed to be outright
fabrications. Since it's a well known fact that fertility rates are lower in affluent
societies than poorer ones, many eugenics advocates feared that "unfit" segments
of society would outbreed and overwhelm the "fit."

Perhaps the most bizarre expression of the eugenics movement in the United States was
the "fittest family" movement. For a time in the 1920's and 1930's, families
entered themselves in county fairs just like cows and chickens, to be judged on physical,
mental and moral fitness. But this movement seems sanity incarnate compared to forms taken
by eugenics in Nazi Germany. Who better to father German children than Olympic athletes?
During the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, German women were encouraged to date Olympic athletes,
but to be sure they recorded the athlete's registration number. If they became pregnant,
the state covered all their maternity costs. (Presumably, this fringe benefit of being in
the Olympics didn't extend to people like Jesse Owens!)

As everyone knows, German racial theories culminated in the Holocaust, where Jews,
Gypsies, and Slavs were killed or worked to death because of their alleged racial
inferiority. More sobering even than that is the German euthanasia program, because it was
initiated and carried out not by German ideologues but by respected psychologists, and
none of the participants was compelled to join. The roots of the program can be traced to
the 1920 book The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value by
jurist Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, both highly respected men. The book,
which actually pre-dates Hitler's start in politics, argues that legal safeguards for
human life should be removed in cases where patients are mentally beyond recovery and
their care is an economic burden on society. Euthanasia of mental patients began in 1939,
long before many other elements of the Holocaust. Between 1939 and 1946 the population of
Germany's mental institutions dropped from 300,000 to 40,000.

In a final incredible act of ingratitude, all the more unbelievable given that Hitler's
rise to power was built on German anger over their defeat in World War I, among those
euthanized were numerous disabled World War I veterans. The euthanasia program was given a
lower profile after 1941; it was affecting morale in the Army, since soldiers began to
fear (with reason) they might be next if they were wounded. But the program continued to
the end of the war; indeed, so convinced were its participants that they were acting
perfectly legally that euthanasia went on in places after the occupation, until the
occupation authorities found out and shut the institutions down. The fate of the
participants reflects the same spotty fate of other German war criminals: execution and
imprisonment for some key figures, lesser or no punishment for many others.

Racist Movements

A natural question in evolution is wondering where and when the different human
populations appeared, and whether one group might be higher in evolutionary stature than
another. (To cut to the chase, the modern answer to the second question is no;
differences among races are inconsequential compared to the range of individual
variations.)

Since primates show a steady increase in brain size from most primitive to most
advanced, perhaps brain size is the key. On the average, white brains are larger than
black, and male brains than female. Thus white males are superior, an obvious conclusion
if you happened to be a 19th century white male. Brain size was considered so important in
the 19th century that many people stipulated that their brains should be weighed after
their deaths, so we have a surprising amount of data on brain sizes of famous people. They
show a range of a factor of two in volume; clearly differences of a few percent between
races can't be significant. Also, advocates of brain size as a measure of intelligence
somehow fail to note that on the average, Asian and Native American brains are larger
than white brains. Finally, Albert Einstein's brain was preserved for study; it has never
shown any physical differences from any other normal brain. Whatever influences
intelligence, it doesn't show up in any known physical characteristics of the brain.

Mental tests of various kinds were devised in the 19th century initially for the
purpose of diagnosing and treating mental handicaps, but they rapidly were turned toward
placing humans in a hierarchy. One test widely used by immigration officials in the U.S.
during the 19th century was to ask an immigrant to draw a picture of a common object like
a house or person. At first glance this test looks better designed than most; it avoids
the problem of literacy and a lot of cultural biases. The only problem was that it had
never occurred to the testers that many immigrants had never used a pencil and
had never developed the motor skills needed to draw a picture. Even believers in the
testing began to suspect something was drastically wrong when over half of some ethnic
groups were rated as mentally retarded by this test.

It's a paradox that while fundamentalists were condemning evolution, many of them
simultaneously embraced the idea that whites might be more highly evolved than blacks. As
the British writer Chesterton observed, "men began by reluctantly enslaving other
men, and ended by just as reluctantly freeing apes." The idea of blacks being closer
to apes than whites reached its climax in an 1874 book by the biologist Ernst Haeckel, who
drew a tree with four branches occupied by an orangutan, a gorilla, a chimpanzee and a
Negro.

The most recent book to argue seriously that there is a real genetic difference in
intelligence between blacks and whites is The Bell Curve. Intelligence tests
given to blacks and whites do tend to show whites having a slightly higher average score.
Most psychologists regard intelligence tests as crude measures at best. They consider the
difference to be statistically insignificant, and attributable to differences in education
and literacy or cultural differences in how questions are interpreted. But even if the
difference is real, the bell curve represents the distribution of individuals; if a black
scores 125 on an IQ test, of what relevance is it that blacks average a few points lower
than whites? And finally, something that believers in genetic differences in intelligence
seem never to notice: a black with a certain score on any intelligence test is smarter
than every white with a lower score!

One Final Question

This history has used terms like "fit" repeatedly without addressing the
central question that abusers of evolution never faced: what do we mean by fit?.
The sports pages are full of people who are magnificent physical specimens but completely
unfit in any other sense; they commit crimes, beat their spouses, and have no skills apart
from being able to bounce a rubber ball or hit a ball with a stick. There have been Nobel
laureates who stole ideas from colleagues and students, others who served the Nazis, and
innumerable business giants who ended their careers in prison. And most of their
achievements are the result of acquired characteristics that cannot be passed on
genetically anyway. On the other hand, Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant minds
ever, is almost totally paralyzed and able to communicate only with a voice synthesizer.

References

Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man

Frederic Wertham, 1966; A Sign for Cain, Macmillan. The German euthanasia
program is detailed in Chapters 8 and 9.